It’s just been pointed out to me the after much waiting, the BBC have started to make AAC streams available for their listen again content on the iPlayer. The bitrates vary from 96 kbps to 128 kbps from what I can see. This will possibly result in better quality. AAC 128kbps can certainly be an improvement over the same bit-rate MP3 but it does seem that the BBC have reduced the bandwidth and quality to AAC 96kbps to save us a whole 32 kbps !! Oh well, you at least still have the choice between MP3 and AAC. Make sure you have rtmpdump installed to be able to download AAC.

In get_iplayer, the default order of trying to download a Radio programme is: iphone,flashaac,flashaudio and realaudio. You can explicitly specify to use AAC mode by using

I’ve never used iTunes but I was under the impression that you can import audio AAC/mp3 and VIDEO: mov and mp4 without transcoding? Anyone? If mp4 doesn’t work try renaming the file to .mov as I have a suspicion that this works.

I have just downloaded some episodes from BBC Radio 7, and they are AAC files. They will not import into iTunes unfortunately, but will play in VLC. Is there any way to get them into iTunes without having to do any transcoding (the bit rates are alread low and I don’t want to futz with the files even more).

Found the problem: the high quality AAC streams from iPlayer (on BBC 7) or AAC, in the ADTS format, which apparently iTunes cannot read.

I guess the only way around this is to either download the slightly lesser quality (?) iPhone MP3 files, or to transcode the AAC into Lossless, even though this means larger file sizes, at least the sound quality is not altered.

Unless anyone had any other methods of getting iTunes to work with ADTS AAC files?

Success: using Quicktime Pro, one can open the iPlayer AAC files, then use the Export command – make sure it’s set to Audio, and check that you can see ‘Passthrough’ mentioned in the information at the bottom of the screen – then just export to MP4. Give it a new file name so it doesn’t over-write the existing file.